The 2007 Australian Federal Election: The Story of Labor's Return from the Electoral Wilderness

In an era of continuous campaigning, elections are seldom won in the final weeks of the formal campaign period. The 2007 Australian federal election saw voters dispatch a Liberal Party and Nationals Coalition government that had presided over a buoyant economy, and return the Australian Labor Party from the electoral wilderness it had occupied since 1996. The explanation of this revival in Labor's stocks can be traced to the Wheat Board scandal, the unpopularity of the labour market deregulation, and to a series of other political tribulations that the fourth Howard Government faced during 2005 and 2006. Initially their impact was masked by the failure of Labor's parliamentary leadership. But when caucus elected Kevin Rudd and freed him to position Labor as offering fresh ideas and a safe pair of hands, Labor seized a lead in the opinion polls and retained it throughout 2007. Rudd's tactical leadership of his party proved critical. This article describes how the 2007 campaign unfolded and the pattern of events which saw a refashioned ALP win an eighteen‐seat lower house majority.     

Block Grants: A Perennial, But Unstable, Tool of Government

During 1995 and 1996, the Congress and the president gave considerableattention to block granting over $200 billion in federal intergovernmentalgrant programs, ranging from large entitlement programs to smallerprograms in housing, vocational education, and law enforcement.In the end, the record of successes was modest—highlightedby welfare-reform legislation that, in some respects, resembleda block grant and in others did not. The contrast between processand outcomes in this most recent block-grant cycle reinforcesthe point that block-grant prospects depend on fundamental fiscal,political, and programmatic forces that are separate from federalismconsiderations. The states' maturation as leaders in many domesticpolicy areas strengthens the performance rationale for blockgrants. The federal fiscal crisis will continue to stimulateinterest in block grants among fedeal as well as state policymakers.The proposals offering the greatest fiscal advantage (i.e.,Medicaid and AFDC) may not be those with the strongest performancerationale. Although recent congressional developments suggeststronger support for states, nationalizing forces remain embeddedin domestic policymaking. Thus, substantial questions remain,posing obstacles to a fundamental and sustained role for blockgrants in the federal system.     

Ethnic relations in the People’s Republic of China: Images and social distance between Han Chinese and minority and foreign nationalities

Han people make up 93 percent of the Chinese population, but little is known in a systematic way about how they view Chinese minority nationalities or foreign peoples. This is a social scientific study of the images that Han Chinese have of nine Chinese ethnic groups and eight foreign nationalities, as well as the social distance they feel from those groups. Based on a survey of 169 Tianjin university students, it employs the Bogardus Social Distance Scale and an adjectival test. It finds that Han Chinese feel affinity for some groups, such as Overseas Chinese, Uygurs, and Americans, while they feel extreme distance from and repulsion toward others, such as Tibetans and Africans. Her book,China’s Only Child: The Family and the School, is forthcoming from the University of Wisconsin Press.     

Representative voter theorems

The representative voter is an individual whose strict preference for any alternative x over any alternative y implies 1) x strictly defeats y by majority rule, if there are an odd number of voters, and 2) x weakly defeats y otherwise. This result holds for the median voter if x is his ideal point or if preferences satisfy a generalized symmetry property, but not in general. We examine a formal condition that guarantees the existence of a representative voter and an economic model in which this condition holds. We also indicate a method for estimating representative voting behavior that is justified when a representative voter exists, and compare this with a method for deriving median voting behavior from an estimated demand curve.